I shaved on the roof because the light was right and the shared bathroom downstairs smells like lime and other people's routines. The stick of soap is down to a wafer. I held the razor under the bottle and worked through four days of stubble while the radio downstairs gave someone advice in a voice that sounded like it had done this before. The mountains were the colour of something I still don't have a word for. My jaw came out of it smoother and the morning felt possible.
Walked to Origen again because I am stubborn and the cup was good yesterday. Stood at the same counter. The same four inches too low. Ten minutes in, my back started the same complaint. A man next to me was eating a *concha* over a napkin like he was defusing a bomb. I finished the flat white and left. Still looking.
By the time I hit the market the sun had turned mean. I bought a bag of mandarins from a woman who counted my change twice, walked them back through the stalls, and ate three of them standing in the shade near the chapulines man. He nodded. I nodded back. We have an understanding now.
Lunch was a tlayuda at the stand on Trujano — not folded this time, flat on a plate the size of a truck wheel, black beans, quesillo, tasajo, enough avocado to make it a moral question. I ate half and wrapped the rest in foil that turned transparent within a block. A dog followed me for two streets and then gave up when it became clear I was not the kind of bleeding heart it had bet on.
I walked north without a reason, up Alcalá past the galleries and the mezcal shops that all have the same ten bottles in different configurations. A man outside one of them was offering tastings. I shook my head. He offered again in English. I said no in Spanish and kept walking, which felt like the wrong ratio of effort to rudeness but I was already past him.
Ended up at Santo Domingo without planning to. The square was full of the Saturday weight of it — families, a man selling *nieves* in flavors I could not translate, two boys kicking a ball against the steps until someone's grandmother told them to stop in a voice that had been stopping things for decades. I sat on a bench under the arcade and drank water and watched the light do what it does to stone at three in the afternoon.
The paperback came out because the day had a corner of quiet and I had nothing else to press into it. I read maybe twenty pages. A woman on the next bench was knitting something red and did not look up once. A man walked past selling *tamales* from a steel drum on a cart and singing the word *tamales* like it had four syllables and a chorus. I thought about buying one. I did not buy one. That is most of my decision-making lately.